A generous 4 stars for Vonnegut

books:


	• Galapagos (Delta Fiction) Kurt Vonnegut Dial Press Trade Paperback, 1999 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 111 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

better twenty years later

Sometime in the late Eighties I read this book, started it anyway, and remember not being very impressed and putting it aside without finishing it. I had cause recently to buy the book again, for someone else, and found myself rereading it with great enjoyment. Maybe it's because it's been more than a few years since I've read a Vonnegut book, maybe it's because he's dead and we'll have no more from him, but I suspect it's because the subject matter is a hundred times more relevant now than it was when written. It reads like it was written yesterday. It's not his best, but even on an off day, ol' Kurt is a whole lot better than most of the rest. We could all learn from him.

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A generous 4 stars for Vonnegut

First, Vonnegut's quirky style is enough to lift this tale into 4-star territory for me. He writes poignantly here on human intelligence as an evolutionary failure (the derisive "big brain" occurs frequently), and with typical enthusiasm.

The plot is told in reminisce, and its slow-going is the big flaw here. Vonnegut's high concepts are hilarious, down to the irony of Galapagos as the cradle of life, but it all takes too long to operate. The jokes within the plot mostly center on cheap tricks in perpetuity (Vonnegut's narrator uses an asterisk next to a character's name to signal imminent death, etc.).

This is a great novel to read for anyone who has exhausted Vonnegut's more popular works, but still yearns for his humor and style. As always, Vonnegut's special touch is in full bloom throughout.

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a little odd....

it's very well written, and pretty interesting
but it is an odd plot
i liked it, but i wouldn't read it twice

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

?Beautiful?provocative, arresting reading.??USA Today

KURT VONNEGUT is a master of contemporary American literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America?s attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as ?a true artist?* with Cat?s Cradle in 1963. He is, as Graham Greene has declared, ?one of the best living American writers.?

Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to a.d. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave new, and totally different human race. Here, America?s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry?and all that is worth saving.

?Vonnegut is a postmodern Mark Twain... Galápagos is a madcap genealogical adventure.??The New York Times Book Review

* The New York Times

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